As described in the ACC Docket article (June 2011 at 154), the legal department at Rosetta Stone has grown in five years from three to 19 – including currently seven lawyers and a dozen non-lawyers. Among the latter are some who combat piracy of the company’s software. My basic belief…
Canadian Lawyer gathered salary data from 117 Canadian in-house counsel. One sentence about the budgets for those participants set me to calculating. “In terms of average legal spends budgeted for 2011, 36 per cent said their corporate legal department would come in under $500,000, 26 per cent said $500,000 to…
A chronic complaint of business unit lawyers is that the mandarins off at headquarters pursue their own agendas on their own time and pace. They are out of touch with the rough-and-tumble of making a dollar. HQ doesn’t feel the same urgency and pressures as the lawyers at the coal…
When legal departments have six or fewer lawyers, not counting the general counsel, it is my impression that the predominant structure is flat. More often than not at that number, all the lawyers report directly to the general counsel. By “report,” I mean the general counsel sometimes assigns them work,…
I doubt that the Board of Directors of companies care one whit about how the law department runs. To them, it’s a black box. Unless there is a problem such as an anti-trust investigation or a gargantuan lawsuit, where for a bit they may wonder about how the problem is…
In a study of 47 companies, mostly insurance, a recent survey found that about a third of them maintain a staff counsel operation. Of those, about half (57%) the time staff counsel for claims “reported structurally through the chief claims officer as opposed to through the legal department.” Among the…
Every year legions of lawyers and the claims specialists who work with them handle tens of thousands of claims. Insurance companies especially care about this onslaught, what with the billions of dollars they spend each year on claims coverage, defense, and resolutions. Other companies also have claims functions when they…
The legal department of WellPoint, the nation’s largest health benefits company by enrollment, supports operations in 14 states. Only ten of WellPoint’s 97 lawyers work in its Indianapolis headquarters. The rest work from 28 different locations. To attempt to bind together that dispersed assemblage, the general counsel, John Cannon, started…
Practical Law, May 2011 at 80, interviews Michael Fricklas, the General Counsel of Viacom. Several points pertinent to law department operations come from that interview. Most strikingly, the $13.5 billion entertainment company has “approximately 240” lawyers. At nearly 20 lawyers for every billion dollars of revenue, Viacom would top the…
Guest blogger Jeff Kaplan of Kaplan & Walker LLP writes: A recently launched benchmarking survey (prepared by Dick Cassin of the FCPA Blog, my partner Rebecca Walker and me) asks respondents to indicate whether the general counsel is the senior official who has been designated to oversee their companies’ anti-corruption…